MongoDB will dominate up to 80% of market, say creators

JAXenter visits 10gens London office to learn more about the people behind the popular NoSQL database.

The London offices of MongoDB developers 10gen are on the second floor of a
plaza block in fashionable Shoreditch, a stone’s throw from other
tech startups like jClarity, Basho and Cosm, and not far from
‘Silicon Roundabout’.

This isn’t your typical corporate environment, even if it may not
be unfamiliar to other startups. In the middle of the office is a
watercooler with an iMac providing a video link to four of the
company’s other offices, and when we return a week later to take
photos, there is a large brass band playing Christmas songs in the
block’s basement.

Yet 18 months ago, 10gen’s London operation wasn’t based out of
here, or any other offices, but Alvin Richards’ flat.

“I started off working in my kids’ bedroom. They went off and
explored London during the day, and I used the bedroom to start to
figure out what’s going on in London,” says Richards, now Technical
Director for EMEA. Though originally hailing from the UK, he joined
10gen from Oracle during its startup days in New York, and a year
into the job was asked to establish a European operation.

Sitting in 10gen’s large, spacious London office – the company’s
third – it looks like he succeeded. In fact the latest 10gen HQ
even has an extra, unoccupied room to compensate for the number of
staff they expect to join the company within the near future.

“Sometimes I have to pinch myself and go, ‘God, that really was
just only 18 months ago’,” he says.

Mongo finds success

MongoDB has managed to race ahead of many of the new non-relational
database systems, with parent company 10gen profiting well from its
success. Founded in New York in 2007, the company now has offices
in Dublin, Palo Alto, Barcelona, Australia and here in London, over
180 staff split between them.

A recent hire is Joe Morrissey, who like Richards is a veteran in
the database space – having worked at Sun (and later Oracle) in the
MySQL department. Now VP of 10gen’s EMEA operations, he sits with a
travel bag next to him: he’s due to jet off to the company’s Dublin
office later this afternoon.

Two weeks before the interview, the company received an
undisclosed investment (estimated to be around $7.6m by
TechCrunch) from Red Hat and Intel – the latter company dipping
their first toes into NoSQL waters. Richards describes a
partnership with Intel as as a “natural fit” while Morrissey claims
that the investment is “a sign of their confidence both in the
NoSQL market… and particularly in us as being the leading NoSQL
vendor”.

What’s so great about MongoDB, then? As you might expect, Richards
and Morrissey have a few answers. “I think we’ve solved real
problems that developers had, which is ‘I need to develop things
faster, I need less impedance, mismatching, doing my day-to-day
job’,” offers Richards.

“And if I do build something that becomes wildly popular, I don’t
want to then throw money at the problem in order to actually figure
out what to scale it. I need something that can start off small,
and then simply add in more compute into a cluster to scale as I
need it to. And also scale back if I need to do that as well.”

Joe Morrissey,
10gen VP EMEA, poses next to a couple of well-placed
props.

Taking on the competition

Within the NoSQL space – a term that the pair are wary of (“I
prefer to call them ‘next-generation databases’,” says Morrissey) –
MongoDB’s major competitor is Cassandra, an Apache Software
Foundation project with a stronger focus on availability.

They’re diplomatic when it comes to discussing competitors,
however, framing the entire NoSQL movement as positive thing for
the industry as a whole.

“Having spent sixteen-plus years working at Oracle and thinking of
the whole world as a relational database problem, I think in the
last four to five years it’s been tremendously exciting to be in
the database business again,” says Richards. “You know, what’s the
difference between Oracle 7, 8, 9 and 10? I wouldn’t be able to
really tell you.”

Yet when asked to compare MongoDB directly to Cassandra, they shy
away a little. “There is not one solution,” answers Richards. “The
different products have made different trade-offs, and they’ve got
different types of usability and failure models, and I think it’s a
question of figuring out how to solve the problem.”

Some have criticised MongoDB for failing to provide
benchmarks, but Richards argues that, without standardised
tests, comparisons between non-relational databases are worthless.
“What would we benchmark against?” he asks.

Despite the even-handed talk of trade-offs, Morrissey boldly
predicts that MongoDB will be ideal for most applications: in fact,
he goes as far to say that MongoDB might dominate “up to 80%” of
the $30bn database market. “We believe that Mongo will be the
leading document-oriented database.”

Scaling outwards

Surely existing database providers like Oracle won’t happily give
up so much of their market share? “Well, I’m a believer in the
ever-expanding universe,” responds Morrissey. “The relational
database, I think we’ll continue to see growth in that market. But
I think, as I said, there’s a whole new section of the database
market that I believe will experience the most rapid growth –
that’s NoSQL.”

For example, adds Richards, previously uncapturable
machine-generated data can now be processed thanks to new databases
like MongoDB. “I think that’s the realisation of what big data is,”
he says. “It’s being able to take data that you would normally be
simply throwing away, or wouldn’t be utilising, and actually turn
that data into a utility for you.”

That said, Morrissey adds, the database market isn’t just going to
be grown by big data. “If that’s all we were about, then I wouldn’t
say that we would be 80% of the use cases,” he says, providing the
example of how MongoDB’s flexible schema fits better with agile
methodologies.

Though neither reveal specific plans, it seems inevitable that
10gen will continue to expand as long as MongoDB continues to
generate traction. Opening new offices, says Richard, is crucial
for reaching 10gen’s international customer base and building a
healthy community around the product.

“We’re not doing that because just we fancy hiring a lot of people
and renting offices,” he enthuses. “There is that demand to have
people on the ground, to be able to help our customers be
successful and go build the next generation of things. And I think
it’s an awesomely exciting place to be.”